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“... a matter either of the past or of the future: in any case not something you can walk round a windy corner and actually find. At the beginning, this did not worry me. Indeed, I was largely unaware, between 1939 and 1941 when I left for the Army, that I was following, or might rather earlier have been following, or with some necessary redirection might still ...”

“... diagram: ‘Now the shadow of the column – the column which supports the south-west corner of the roof – divides the corresponding corridor of the veranda into two equal parts.’ The prose seldom wavers from this sterile, descriptive rigour, yet its eerie rhythms and hypnotic repetitions – and its curious absence of affect – create a ...”

“... As the bombing of Barcelona continued, Tàpies remembered, ‘my father and me huddling in a corner of his office … as bombs fell … I can still hear with horror the piercing cries and see the smoke.’ With Franco’s troops moving towards Barcelona, Tàpies’s father went into hiding, afraid that the Catalan government ‘would require him to go ...”

“... open to the secretary of state were financial, and as punishment for the IRA’s theft of £26.5m, Paul Murphy announced on 10 March that Sinn Féin would be stripped of parliamentary allowances for Westminster worth £400,000. The next evening I drive to Moortown, a Republican area outside Cookstown, on the west side of Lough Neagh. There are pockets of ...”

“... gabled Victorian house. From the high window you could see half of the policeman’s helmet of St Paul’s dome, and further on, a glimpse of Parliament’s spires, and its loyal river selflessly flowing between its crowded banks. At dusk, holding a drink by the window and waiting for Jane to return home, I loved to see the city streetlights arrive in amber ...”

“... In November​ 2017, Marc Gabolde, an Egyptologist at Paul Valéry University in Montpellier, received a grainy photograph on his phone from a colleague attending the opening party for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The picture showed a pink granite stele on display at the museum. Had Gabolde seen it before? If not, what did he think? The stele was dated to 1327 BCE and came from Abydos, a sacred city on the upper banks of the Nile ...”

“... to a Yom Kippur service at the synagogue of the Lubavitch sect, located just around the corner from where Mailer grew up. The chapter also offers a usefully detailed account of Podhoretz’s political misadventures when for a short spell he strayed from the conservative line on Sixties radicalism. It was then that he championed and helped secure the ...”

“... and processing houses of Britain.Supermarket strategists have had their eye on local for a while. Paul Kelly, in charge of ‘external affairs and corporate responsibility’ for Asda, told me of a distribution hub in Cumbria that was pouring local produce into one of his stores in Kendal (30 tubs of English Lakes ice cream are sold for every one of Ben ...”

“... childhood, at least until my adolescence, my playmates had called me a sissy . . . On every street corner, I was called a faggot.’ He found odd jobs and then lost them, washing dishes, working as an elevator boy. He drank, he had casual affairs, he suffered a number of nervous crises. The five years between the death of his father and his leaving New York ...”

“... though the audience could choose to bury you at any moment’. She summoned up a quote from Paul Celan: ‘There was earth inside them, and they dug.’ Chiara Ambrosio, like many others calibrating the difficulty of existence in an increasingly pressured environment, where substantial memory traces are redacted and the surface of things is revamped on ...”

“... compared with what might be expressed in words. I felt this strongly as I stood before the Paul Veronese. I felt assured that more of Man, more of awful and inconceivable intellect, went into the making of that picture than of a thousand poems.John Ruskin’s diary, 8 September 1849Over the past half-century or so, when writers have turned their ...”

“... major song and Etta one of the supreme live performers. Once, at a surreal outdoor concert at the Paul Masson Winery, marooned among pre-tech-stock-crash Silicon Valley yuppies dutifully sipping Chardonnay, I watched her do the plumpest, most lascivious cakewalk imaginable. But I could hardly live on her for the rest of the day. I started squawking like an ...”

“... neck. He was a small man with a folksy didacticism and a strong resemblance to the late magician Paul Daniels. He sat at the head of a long table. In front of him was a copy of the daily Rzeczpospolita with a picture of Theresa May on the front page. It was mid-January and May had just made her speech declaring that Britain, as part of leaving the ...”

“... successor. Brown let it be known that he didn’t approve (in this he was egged on by his friend Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail) and that was that. In other respects gambling reform in Britain followed the path Budd laid down for it. The Gambling Act of 2005 essentially treated the activity as part of the leisure industry, something that needed its own rules ...”

“... to establish it as a predestined episode in the history of the species: ‘Capitalists in a small corner of the Western world invested in steam, laying the foundation of the fossil economy; at no moment did the species … exercise any sort of shared authority over its own destiny and that of the earth system.’ Nor in the time since has the species en bloc ...”